Dr. Nicole Rochester:

Dr. Chang, I’m going to stay with you for a moment. Can you share any successful strategies for healthcare provider to healthcare provider education, any innovative approaches with regard to side effect management in CLL?

Dr. Andres Chang:

Yeah, I think that as important as educating patients, educating other healthcare providers is as critical. And as such, I think one of the missions that we have at academic institutions is that we should also offer some educational aspect to our consultant physicians across the community or nurse practitioners or nursing staff. And so one of the things that I commonly do is that my notes tend to have a couple of paragraphs that explain my rationale behind the recommendations with sources, primary sources of information if they want to look up any particular data where I’m basing my decision on. And that happens both in terms of picking this treatment versus this other treatment, what is the efficacy data, but also for side effect and adverse events data.

I also, as part of the Winship Cancer Institute, we have a big outreach program to our community. And I’m sure Dr. Ermann has [this] too over at Utah, where we have outreach programs and reach out to other community oncologists, trying to give them information about the newest and latest therapies. We do symposia. And we also have an app where community oncologists can actually look us up directly and give us a call or something that, in case they run into problems. And then we are happy to talk to them and help guide the management of their particular patients. I find that this kind of verbal communication and live direct provider-to-provider contact has been very useful. And I think that the community oncologists have really appreciated that.

Dr. Nicole Rochester:

I’m sure that they do. That is amazing. That’s awesome. What about you, Dr. Ermann? Do you have anything to add in terms of what you all are doing at your institution to communicate with other healthcare providers?

Dr. Daniel Ermann:

I just have to say Dr. Chang and I were on the same page. I completely agree with everything he said. I think that he is…it’s we’re super imposable at this point. I do the exact same things as he does, which is great, I think. I think that that’s fantastic. A couple other things I would just say as well is that I agree 100 percent. Communication is the biggest thing. Communication is not only one of the most important things, but it also can be a big barrier. So I think fostering communication between, a lot of what I do is deal with local oncologists as the academics. So I may only see patients a couple times a year, whereas the local oncologist may see them a couple times a month.

And so having an open line of communication, whether it be cell phone, like occasionally I’ll be texting local providers, calling them, having their phone number is very helpful, emailing back and forth. And then after I see patients, similar to Dr. Chang, I document well in my notes. And I also have my team send the note to them through fax or other means. So things like that, I think are very valuable and important and I think are game-changers when it comes to excellent patient care, because the communication barrier can sometimes be one of the biggest ones.